


Schlachtschiff

by AndyAO3



Series: Angry Marshmallows and Sad Robots [8]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Disabled Lone Wanderer, Drabble, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 06:10:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4993240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndyAO3/pseuds/AndyAO3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just. Fucking aliens, man. Aliens!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. no helping it!

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this drabble a while back. Chronologically it happens postgame, after Point Lookout and the Pitt and some parts of Broken Steel. I can't remember whether I had a beta or not. I don't think I did? Posting it anyway because I haven't got a chapter up yet after my weeklong hiatus but I still want to have something to show you guys.
> 
> Literally anything with Ted in it has a T rating for the copious amounts of swearing he does.

Aliens.

Fucking _aliens_.

Ted Davies had seen a lot of shit in his time, but really? _Aliens?_

Part of him still didn’t believe it. He didn’t know whether he’d been on the ship for hours or years by that point; considering the fact that he’d met a cowboy, a samurai, a pre-war army medic, a little girl, and a woman he was pretty sure was a slaver, he wasn’t sure of anything. Hopefully he hadn’t been out of action for too long, but he knew without a doubt that he had to get back planetside. Preferrably back to DC, if he could manage it.

“Jesus, Hark’s gonna kill me…” he muttered, slapping another energy cell into the pilfered alien pistol he was using. They’d cleared out main engineering, and were working their way up to the bridge, deck by painstaking deck.

And almost out of habit, Ted had leapt at the chance to have someone with him to provide cover fire. Anyone. Even the twitchy medic who was damn near afraid of his own shadow. “Wait, who’s Hark?” Elliot Tercorien asked predictably. He questioned everything.

That was okay, though. Ted didn’t mind answering questions as a rule. “My robot boyfriend,” he deadpanned.

“Your– your _what?”_ Elliot - or Ellie, in Ted’s opinion - blanked for a minute as he processed the new information. “I-I mean, not that it’s, y'know, bad or anything. Takes all kinds and all that. Just, uh… Wow. How would that even work?”

Ted snickered. Almost as funny as Somah throwing up her hands and saying she didn’t want to know, and certainly better than having to give Paulson a vocab lesson only to be lectured on the evils of sodomy. “Let’s just say he’s not your run-of-the-mill Handy, alright?”

“I… If you say so.” Appropriately traumatized, Elliot went silent for a while after that.

The two of them rounded a corner and started down a new corridor, with Ted wincing at the unsubtle clanking steps of his armor-clad companion. Not that he expected a medic to be particularly stealthy, but he’d hoped that the one person among them who had combat training (excluding the samurai, but no one fucking knew what he was babbling about) might actually be useful to have with him.

He’d figured that if anything, it couldn’t be worse than Paulson charging in headfirst and shooting at anything that moved, or Somah being practically wonderglued to cover until the shooting was already done. And like hell he’d bring Sally. He had enough heart problems as it was. So it was Elliot he brought, and thus Elliot who was proving to be about as useful as if Ted were to tape an excitable puppy to the side of his head. A puppy that was jacked up on Quantum.

Damn. Those holographic symbols over the doors would be a lot more useful if he could tell what the fuck they actually were, huh? Ted stopped to peer at one, craning his neck. Was it writing, or some kind of pictograph? Shit, he’d always been bad at languages.

“What was that noise?” Elliot whispered urgently, snapping Ted out of his thoughts; he jerked back to glare at the jumpy medic, who had in fact just made unnecessary noise by voicing his own thoughts like an idiot. At which point Elliot gasped, threw his hands up in a placating gesture, and squeaked “sorry” like it’d help.

It didn’t. It just made more noise. And Ted bit back a curse as he heard the telltale _vwoom_ of a nearby teleporter.

Ted was quick to take cover behind a bulkhead, a shot whizzing past where he’d been standing as he yanked Elliot along with him. Already he heard the whirring of one of their drones, along with aliens barking what sounded like orders at each other in their shrill voices. He could also hear the teleporter activating time and again, likely with more troops each time. How much cannon fodder could they possibly have left to spare? They had to be running out of drones, at least.

More shots flew past them - some fizzling out on the bulkhead Ted had hidden behind - along with one of those bouncing sticky bombs that the drones fired. Ted threw his hands up to cover his face before the resulting explosion seared the hair on his arms and made his ears ring with a tinny sound. Elliot’s squawk told him that the medic hadn’t had the sense to to do the same.

Ten shots to an energy cell. He had five energy cells to spare. God, what he wouldn’t give for some grenades. “Ellie, cover me,” he ordered, darting over to a console on the opposite wall to get a better vantage point.

A shot had already grazed his jacket (he could smell the burnt leather and fuck if that didn’t piss him off; he’d gotten that jacket at Point Lookout, damn it) by the time Elliot had even pulled out his weapon, and Ted was in cover again as the medic was starting to aim. Then Elliot got off about two shots before he almost dropped his gun because one of the aliens had narrowly missed his head.

And this guy was the one who had combat training? Christ, they really were screwed.


	2. as it was promised, here's one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A familiar face is seen through all the crazy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Threw this together like, today. Because today is apparently a drabble day and not a day for important things like FUCKING FINISHING MY CHAPTERS LIKE SERIOUSLY ANDY WHAT THE HELL.
> 
> I'm interpreting Elliot as an incompetent boob because literally all of them were incompetent boobs and I ended up just leaving them behind and doing most of the DLC myself. Lone wanderer, lol. No beta because drabbles never have betas.

Ted was pretty sure that the section of the ship they were in was the robotics lab. He had found a conveyor belt and jammed a stolen shock baton into its workings, and the conga line of drones that the aliens were sending at them had truncated abruptly after that. Now they were down to scared, unarmed workers, and neither Ted nor Ellie had the heart to shoot their squeaky asses.

Not that Ellie had the heart to shoot much of anything. Seriously, hadn't the guy been posted up in Alaska? Like, Anchorage or somefuck? Either that Outcast sim had been even more of a nationalist propaganda stunt than Ted thought it was or Ellie just plain wasn't cut out for combat. Ted had spent more time saving the medic's ass than watching his own. Gotten clipped a couple times for his trouble, too.

Ehh, at least that alien superglue worked for minor scrapes as well as wonderglue did.

"I don't think you should be doing that," the medic said, watching Ted roll up his sleeve and apply epoxy to a bloody gouge on his right arm. It was partly cauterized, because energy weapons, but it was still seeping enough to be annoying.

It stung, but no more than the one time he'd used Amata's clear-coat nail polish on a split lip. "Haven't had an allergic reaction yet," Ted replied. "If you've got a better idea, lemme know."

"I-I could try to make that medi-gel the aliens have been using into something we could use?" Elliot suggested.

Ted gave him a bland look. Didn't this dumbass know anything? "I'm not injecting strange and experimental drugs into my system when I don't know how they'll interact with what I'm already on, jackass."

"O-oh. Right. Sorry." The medic wilted, before turning away to fidget in the direction of a nearby console and dejectedly try to poke the buttons on it and make them do something.

Once again, the excitable puppy comparison came to mind. Except now Ted felt like he'd kicked said puppy. Fuck. Same reasons he didn't bring anyone but Harkness along for things back home, really. Even not counting the whole relationship thing, Hark was probably the best partner in crime he could have asked for. Good situational awareness, good reflexes, good eyesight, good at stealth if needed. Strong, perceptive, good-looking...

Okay, maybe that last part didn't matter quite as much. But seriously, Hark _did_ have a really nice ass. Nice everything, actually. Shit, Ted really had to get his mind out of the gutter. An awkward boner in a potential combat situation was the last thing he needed when the only one around to take it out on was the resident wibble-muffin. Elliot was far less enticing than Harkness when it came to targets for victorious face-sucking.

Something _beep_ ed. Ted was jerked out of his thoughts by the noise, and whipped around to glare accusingly at Elliot. "Ellie," he warned.

"Itwasn'tme!" Elliot squawked, throwing his hands up again to show his innocence. Ted was starting to suspect that was a thing with him (both the impromptu jazz hands and the potentially terminal case of chronic fuck-up). He'd stepped back from the console, putting a good two feet between himself and the alien electronics. "It just came on by itself, I swear!"

Ted sighed and pushed past him to inspect the console. "You're literally the worst at this, Ellie," he muttered, eyeing the symbols and patterns that made about as much sense to him as Japanese sign language.

Well. He could tell that _something_ had been turned on, at least. He couldn't quite tell what that something was. But judging by the fact that a panel had opened up in the wall about ten meters off, he suspected they'd find out soon.

Very, very soon, he realized; there was a teleporter going off just beyond the newly opened panel. "Shit," he grumbled. Elliot must've tripped an alarm. Either that or one of the fleeing workers had.

And he was running very, very low on ammo. Two power cells. One had five shots left in it and was, in fact, still in his pistol.

Grabbing Elliot and dragging him behind cover had become habitual by then, a shot grazing Ted's rolled left sleeve directly above his pip-boy. Honestly, Somah had been the only one he hadn't needed to yank behind a bulkhead so far. He was starting to wish he'd brought her, as she'd at least shown a bit of a self-preservation instinct even if she was about as helpful in a fight as a balloon with a face doodled on it. A snarky balloon. Full of sass instead of helium. He really liked Somah, okay?

The aliens that came out of the teleporter were yelling. Shouting something in their weird language. It sounded emphatic. Maybe a little panicked. But there was something smug in it, too. Ted frowned to himself at the strangeness of it. They hadn't sounded smug so far. Shocked, terrified, angry. Never cocky.

He took a chance at poking his head out from the bulkhead and yelped as a lightning-fast shot neatly singed his hair, missing his head by mere millimeters and forcing him back down. Shit. Shit shit _shit_. What the fuck was with that reaction time? He hadn't been able to even get a clear view, let alone a chance to aim with VATS. None of the aliens or their clumsy-ass drones or even their turrets had been that good.

What the hell.

There was more yelling. More orders being given, Ted realized. He heard footsteps, coming towards them. Thinking quickly, he pulled out a beat-up empty lighter and held it up so he could get a look at what was after them. Before it was sniped out of his hand - falling to the floor in a half-melted lump of slag as he jerked back reflexively from the heat - Ted got a glimpse of a human figure in the smudged reflection.

No.

Those arrogant, bug-eyed motherfuckers.

Ted grit his teeth. Elliot made as if to draw his weapon but Ted was faster, snatching his arm and holding him down. " _Don't_ ," he hissed, knowing full well that the medic wouldn't last more than a few seconds. No human could. Not even Ted. Not against A3-21.

Oh, these bastards were gonna fucking _pay_.

He cleared his throat. Right then. Had to be fast. Had to hope that the aliens had been as hamfisted about hacking as they'd been about gene splicing, missing the subtleties in the complex code. The safeguards Ted had worked in counted on it. "Activate A3-21 recall code violet," he called out, "admin authorization delta, alpha, niner, echo, two, lima."

The footsteps stopped. The aliens' shouting became confused. Then alarmed. Then terrified as the shots started firing. Ted didn't look up to witness the carnage, waiting it out. Next to him, Elliot stared blankly for a moment before slowly rising to peer out from behind cover at the scene behind them.

"What did you do?" the medic whispered, awed.

When the shooting was done, a familiar voice rang out through the deathly silence. Unsure. Unsettled. "Ted?"

"I'm here, babe," Ted replied, feeling himself relax for the first time since he'd woken up on this goddamn flying acid trip of a ship. "You okay?"

"I'm--" Harkness paused. Assessing, probably. "--I might. Be malfunctioning. The current timestamp is registering as a week ahead of where it should be and our position is reading as being twenty miles off of sea-level in the vicinity of... Queensland, Australia."

"Sounds about right."

Harkness made a distressed noise that wasn't quite human. It was hard to describe how it was off, specifically. Maybe it was the weird little hitch in it that gave the impression of a fraying wire losing its contact for a fraction of a second. "Ted," he said again, haltingly. "What's going on?"

Aw. Ted had the urge to laugh, even though it'd be a little cruel, but he decided to finally stand and walk over to his confused and upset android instead, ignoring the scattered alien bodies all around. He could see at a glance that Harkness was mostly unharmed. From the front, anyway. The connection to get to his system was on the back of his neck, and Harkness had been stuffed into a human-sized version of what seemed to be the standard alien uniform that concealed it.

He could also see that Harkness was looking very upset in spite of being just as neat and tidy as ever. Those bastards. This was probably every old fear Harkness had tried to bury all wrapped into one neat little experience, wasn't it? Of course he would be a mess.

Ted reached out to take the android's hands, winding their fingers together. "You're not malfunctioning, babe. We really are on an alien ship hovering over Earth, and it probably really has been a week. Okay?"

Harkness stared. First at Ted, then at their entwined hands. He nodded slowly after a while, brows knitted into a tight little knot. "Okay," he said.

Ted smiled and squeezed his robot's hands reassuringly.

From back behind cover, Elliot could only gawk at the two of them. "Wow," he breathed. "That's your robot?"

"Ellie, seriously. Shut up."

"Right. Shutting up."


End file.
